The Syrian civil war is at a turning point, and it could get even more violent

Fighters
loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad celebrate with
residents of Nubul and al-Zahraa after breaking the siege of
their towns in the northern Aleppo countryside, Syria, in this
handout picture provided by SANA, the Syrian state-run media
organization, on February 4, 2016.Reuters

The Syrian civil war is reaching a turning point. Over the past
two weeks, the regime of Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad seized
several villages north of Aleppo, the country's
largest city and one of the last remaining strongholds of Syria's
nonjihadist rebels.

The advance
cut off Aleppo's anti-regime groups from their last remaining
supply lines into Turkey, and put Assad in a position to retake a
fiercely contested city that had a prewar population of over 2
million.

Assad's gains have come on the backs of foreign militaries that
are themselves showing signs of strain.

A map from Fabrice Balanche, a visiting fellow at the
Washington Institute of Near East Peace, gives an idea of what's
probably coming next within Syria. With Assad's army on the
march, the regime, and Kurdish militias who are not necessarily
opposed to the regime, is now in a position to retake the
entirety of the Turkish-Syrian border.

At the same time, the rebel defeat in Aleppo — one of
the nonjihadist-rebel movement's last remaining strongholds
— means Assad may now have the opportunity to
encircle ISIS's Raqqa enclave by sweeping across
eastern Syria:

The near-term looks promising for the regime. As the map
shows, it has options now that Assad and his partners have broken
the Aleppo stalemate.

That still doesn't mean Assad's won.

Assad's gains have revealed his dependence on Iranian and Russian
support. And as Balanche writes, the regime's gains may
trigger an alarming shift in strategy among anti-Assad regional
powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Assad's opponents could try
to open up new battle lines that would threaten the regime's
survival in a best-case scenario — while endangering Lebanon's
stability and expanding the regional character of the war.

Balanche writes that Syria and Saudi Arabia could
"open a new front in northern Lebanon, where local Salafist
groups and thousands of desperate Syrian refugees could be
engaged in the fight." It's a high-risk, high-reward strategy:
"Such a move would directly threaten Assad's Alawite heartland in
Tartus and Homs, as well as the main road to Damascus. Regime
forces would be outflanked, and Hezbollah's lines of
communication, reinforcement, and supply between Lebanon and
Syria could be cut off."

At the same time, it would expand the scope of the conflict
into an already unstable neighboring country, deepen the
involvement of outside powers, and trigger even more Russia and
Iranian investment in sustaining Assad.

The Syrian civil war could intensify even with Assad
"winning," and even without the opening of an additional
front.

It will take months, or perhaps even years, of intense
combat for Assad to consolidate the gains depicted in Balanche's
map — Aron Lund, editor of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace'sSyria in
Crisiswebsite, told Business Insider by email
last week that it's conceivable it could take the
regime "many years" just to fully retake
Aleppo.

Assad's existing gains have also come at an enormous human
cost. Tens of thousands of people have already fled Aleppo,
creating a wave of refugees that neighboring states are already
struggling to address — and that could complicate Europe's
struggles to integrate the continent's current refugees from
the conflict.